Facebook previewed their new design recently, featuring a new feed interface and tabbed pages. It’s all looking strikingly more like a portal start page I imagined before.
The app page has essentially become a version of Netvibes within Facebook. Users can add/remove applications to a separate page in the same way Netvibes adds widgets (in fact you could add Facebook to Netvibes). There are minor details, such as the web page needs to expand to fill a users larger browser window.
It all strikes me as Facebook becoming a lot more like My Yahoo than Google. The big difference is that Facebook has a social context. One of the hardest problems with start pages can be getting new users to invest in building their own page. Facebook’s viral loops make it a collaborative effort (friends suggest apps).
Facebook also doesn’t incorporate web search, but that’s because they don’t want you to leave.
The other shoe that I’m waiting to see drop will be the “Google - like” strategy out of Facebook when they start finally leveraging data outside of the network.
